Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has started production of 3nm chips for Intel’s upcoming CPUs. The new chips will be used in Intel’s Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake platforms.
TSMC has been producing 3nm chips for over a year, initially for Apple’s A17 Pro chip for the iPhone and its M3 and M4 processors. Now, the focus has shifted to Intel, which will be using TSMC’s 3nm process for both Lunar Lake and Arrow Lake.
Lunar Lake’s compute tile is made on TSMC’s 3nm process, while the SoC and I/O components are disaggregated on the chip’s only other chiplet, the SoC tile, which is built on the TSMC 6 nm node. The architecture features Lion Cove P-cores and Skymont E-cores, and an iGPU based on the Xe2 graphics architecture.
Arrow Lake, on the other hand, will feature the same cores as Lunar Lake but arranged in a more familiar ringbus configuration. It’s unclear how Intel will organize the various chiplets or tiles for Arrow Lake. It was previously rumored that TSMC would make the high-end Arrow Lake CPU tile, while Intel 20A would be used for the midrange and lower chips.
The first notebooks powered by Lunar Lake are expected to hit shelves within Q3-2024, with Arrow Lake following on in Q4. Both Arrow Lake for desktop and Lunar Lake for mobile will be utilizing TSMC’s 3nm process.
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